


Familiar

by erinthesails



Series: The Only End I Foresee [7]
Category: Hanna Is Not A Boy's Name
Genre: Gen, Hannapocalypse, M/M, anger problems and insecurities and psychic tantrums oh my!
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-26
Updated: 2019-05-26
Packaged: 2020-03-09 12:46:11
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 14,614
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18917296
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/erinthesails/pseuds/erinthesails
Summary: It’s Halloween in California. Again. This time, Conrad and Worth have an extra passenger along for the ride, and Lamont is determined to prove she's up to the job. But on Hallows Eve, you can't outrun the ghosts of the past for long...





	Familiar

**Author's Note:**

  * For [DesdemonaKaylose](https://archiveofourown.org/users/DesdemonaKaylose/gifts).
  * Inspired by [The Indigo Children](https://archiveofourown.org/works/8058052) by [DesdemonaKaylose](https://archiveofourown.org/users/DesdemonaKaylose/pseuds/DesdemonaKaylose). 



> Dez requested Lil Lamont meeting her namesake and somehow it turned into a Whole Thing.
> 
> Also, fun fact, I reread "Saints and Spirits" after I wrote the whole beginning of this, and realized the gang also had a Scooby Doo bit in that fic. So now it's not copying, it's totally an intentional, clever callback!

_California_

_Year 13_

“Hate bein’ back here,” Worth said through gritted teeth. “Gives me the heebie jeebies.”

He had been cleaning his shotgun since they hit Reno, in that compulsive way he always did when he was nervous. Conrad’s knuckles had been going steadily whiter on the wheel of the borrowed SUV for each mile of desert that ticked by enroute to the west coast.

They’d both been uncharacteristically quiet as open road gave way to scattered suburbs and the first hints of cityscape, and t _hat_ more than anything else was giving Lamont the heebie jeebies at the moment. Conrad and Worth’s bickering was a universal constant of life on the road. Like the hum of tires on asphalt or the rattle of bullets in the back. Its absence had her more on edge than the imprint of ruined office buildings and apartment complexes looming in the night sky ahead, no matter the significance of this particular city in her family history.

“’The heebie jeebies?” Conrad raised an eyebrow, his lips twitching into the ghost of a smile. “I’m sorry, have you been possessed by Daphne Blake?”

“Ya said I can’t swear in front of the kid,” Worth jabbed a thumb toward Lamont, who scowled in the back seat. Conrad had caught her swearing a blue streak the other day when she dropped a crate full of salt beef on her foot, and he’d been trying, without much success, to clean up the family’s collective vocabulary ever since. Which mostly meant smacking Worth upside the head for every other word that came out of his mouth. “I can get a lil more colorful if ya—"

“No, no, I think I prefer ‘heebie jeebies,’ thank you.”

“’S what I thought,” Worth grinned, clicking the barrel back into place. “And for yer information sweetcheeks, I’m more’va Freddy. You can be Daphne if ya want though. Got the rack for it at least.”

Lamont made a face and flicked one of her butterfly knives between her fingers as Worth leaned out of Conrad’s reach. Her eyes ticked between the two of them as Worth laughed and Conrad sputtered threats of violence, free hand swinging in the direction of his head.

The fresh surge of chatter from the front seat did put her nerves at ease a little, but she honestly wasn’t sure if she preferred their strange silence or this particularly gross brand of fighting they fell into when they were especially anxious. Most of the time their bickering was easy to tune out. It was comforting almost, like the constant tinkling of the music boxes John and Amelia filled the house with back in Tallahassee. But when they got like this, Lamont couldn’t help feeling a little like they’d forgotten she was in the car altogether.

“God, you’re disgusting. How is that better than swearing, exactly?”

“Ya never said I had ta keep it G-rated! All ya said’s no swearin. Ya gotta be more specific than that darlin’, I ain’t a mind reader!”

“Oh, you know perfectly well what I meant. Jokes about my _anatomy_ should go without saying.”

“Well, princess, ya shouldn’t make it so damn easy—"

“Who am I?”

Lamont forward, sticking her head right between Conrad’s flailing arms and Worth’s widening grin.

The manic gleam in Worth’s eyes died as he turned to look at her.

“Eh?”

“In Scooby-Doo,” Lamont pressed. “Which character am I?”

Worth squinted and scratched his chin. “You ever even seen Scooby-Doo, kid?”

“John has some old VHS tapes back in Tallahassee,” she said defensively. “We used to watch them while you guys were traveling sometimes.”

Worth snorted.

“Whadda ya know. All it took was the end of the world fer VHS tapes to make a comeback.”

“So? Who would I be?”

“I dunno. Scooby.”

“ _Scooby?”_

“Yeah, yanno,” Worth pulled the gun back into his lap. “Small. Always gettin’ inta trouble. Good fer a laugh.”

Lamont glared. She might have actually tried to glare a hole in his head if she hadn’t accidentally set fire to John’s curtains when she tried that last winter. Weird new abilities, it seemed, were bursting out of her at the most inopportune moments these days. Best to be on the safe side with this sort of thing. But she still wasn’t about to let him off the hook for that. “That is such a bullshit answer, I’m not a sidekick!”

“Hey, watch the language,” Conrad shot her a look over his shoulder.

“Scooby ain’t a sidekick, he’s the main character! They named tha whole operation after ‘im!”

 “Well, _I_ think you’re more of a Velma,” Conrad offered.

Lamont crossed her arms irritably. “Ugh, she’s such a pussy.”

“Oh, come on! What did I just say about language?”

Conrad’s lips were pressed into a thin line, but Worth was snorting into the oil rag and grinning at her and suddenly that was all that mattered. She grinned back, forgetting for a second that she was supposed to be annoyed at him.

“I already know the answer anyway,” Lamont sat back in her seat. “I’d be Thorn.”

They both just looked at her.

“You know, Thorn? Lead singer of the Hex Girls?”

Blank stares.

Lamont huffed. “Now who hasn’t seen Scooby-Doo?”

 

Their bickering died back down as the outline of the city loomed clearer and starker in the moonlight, and Lamont went back to turning one of the knives over and over in her hand. She’d picked them up from a grateful collector in Missouri after a delivery job a few weeks back. Conrad had been trying to confiscate them ever since they realized the blades were tipped with iron.

“I don’t see why you have to use real iron while you’re still learning,” he’d pleaded intermittently down the whole length of the Mississippi. “We’ll find you a stainless set, come on, hand it over. Just until you’ve got the technique down.”

“Aw, come off it Connie,” Worth had butted in eventually. “Let tha kid practice in peace, she ain’t never gonna get it with you squawkin’ at her. Sides, a few burnt fingers never hurt nobody. Builds character.”

Conrad had relented after a while, but Lamont had been careful to hide her slowly scarring knuckles since then. It had been taking her longer than she’d thought to get the technique down, but she would get there. Eventually.

Conrad had his pistols. Worth had his shotgun. Knives, she decided, were going to be her thing. Or they would be when the two of them finally get her foot in the door of the family business. But no, she was still stuck on lookout duty, or keeping an eye on the civilians duty, or “get yer ass back in the car this second, or _I_ _swear…”_ duty.

She liked to imagine that one of these days she would surprise them, follow them into the field, knives flying, mowing down their enemies at their side. They could hardly keep her parked on the sidelines after that. She just had to get the hang of the damn things first. It would help if she could get more than ten minutes of practice in at a time not sitting in the back of a moving vehicle. Blood bloomed from her thumb as the SUV jolted over a pothole and she stuck it quickly into her mouth before either of them could smell it.

She flicked the blade again and caught it passably this time. See? Getting there.

A sign indicating city limits flashed by in the headlights, suburban ruins climbing into slumping office buildings, ruined apartments, the blackened outer edges of urban sprawl. She could see, faintly, the flicker of streetlights deeper in the city, but out here the streets were still lifeless and dark, houses long since gutted of anything that made them livable. In the front seat, both men had gone tense and silent again.

Conrad finally spoke, glancing over his shoulder at her.

“When we get there,” he said, “you’ll be staying with some friends of Hanna’s. Just while we take care of whatever it is he needs taken care of this time. We’ll be back before you know it. It’ll be…well, not fun probably, but boring if all goes well.”

She bit back an argument and forced herself to nod mechanically.

They’d been on the tail end of a small job rooting out a nest of Lavellan up in Denver when the homing rune Uncle Hanna left them went off. Squishing rats was just the kind of boring, safe job they’d started taking her along on just so she couldn’t complain too much about getting left out, so Lamont had jumped at the possibility of a real mission.

For the past six months, Hanna had been ironing out charters and chatting up diplomats from long-established Seelie communities and late-flourishing human populations on the west coast. Between high population density and rigorous anti-smoking laws, California had been among the states hardest hit by the plague and one of the slowest to bounce back after. But human civilization had finally started kicking up again, and of course, that had drawn Hanna right in like a moth to flame. They hadn’t expected him back until Christmas at least. The fact that he’d flagged them so early signaled to Lamont that whatever he had in store was likely to be a damn sight more exciting than whatever was next on their docket.

To confirm her suspicions, Conrad and Worth had seriously discussed booking it to a safehouse in Texas or South Dakota or even back in Tallahassee to tuck her away before doubling back to California. Worth had actually suggested (over her _extreme_ objections) that they lock her in a shipping container outside Provo with some food, water, and a protective rune until they got back. But just as she was gearing up to kick up a stink about being brought along, to her delight, they were barreling over the Great Basin with her in tow. Worth never quite seemed to cotton to the idea though, even two days later.

As if on cue, he snorted in the front seat.

“Mebbe we should drop her off with good ol’ Uncle Ples fer some bonding time.”

Conrad’s hands tightened on the wheel.

“Don’t,” he intoned. “Even joke about that.”

A shiver passed through him as they wound through streets littered with blackened bricks and dull, brown-orange leaves.

“Why did it have to be this city of all places?” Conrad was eyeing every building with the well-informed caution of an amateur zookeeper. “And on Halloween? Haven’t we nearly gotten killed here enough times?”

“This better be important or I swear I’m gonna strangle the twerp,” Worth grunted. “Had a nice lil’ vacation in Aspen all planned out, ‘n it’ll be too damn cold next month.”

 Conrad shot him a look. “I don’t buy that for a second. You’ve never vacationed a day in your life.”

“I do when there’s a fresh shipment’a Brazillian bloodthorn in the mix,” Worth grinned.

“Don’t listen to him Lamont,” Conrad said irritably. “Substance abuse is bad, Worth is an irresponsible idiot, et cetera, et cetera.”

“Didn’ hear ya sayin’ that in Salem last year! Lemme tall ya Monty, Conrad here knows how ta party when he’s got half a—"

“Oh HUSH, she doesn’t need to hear about all that…”

Lamont rolled her eyes and clicked the knife shut, shoving it into her pocket. There they went again, into their own little world, as if she wasn’t even there.

She leaned her head up against the window, trying to tune them out again. Watching unlit streets whiz past and wondering how close they were. Then something caught her eye.

It was a cloudless night, a crisp autumn heat sucking every drop of moisture from the air, and the moon was nearly full. But as she watched, she noticed something that looked like a lone storm cloud hanging in the sky above them. It was dark and formless, sprawling out in the dark gaps between the stars, scratching at the moon’s edges, muting the light. Lamont squinted.

“Hey guys?” she tried to cut through their overlapping voices. “What is—”

WHUMP.

Something slammed full force into the roof of the car, sending them fishtailing over the highway.

Conrad wrestled with the steering wheel, yanking it back to the middle of the road just before the front could bump over sidewalk.

“Wot th’ hell was—"

There was a screeching and fluttering outside the car and something dark and full of edges shot past the window ahead of them. Notable, since they were already speeding down the road at Conrad’s preferred clip of Extremely Fucking Fast.

“You’ve got your seatbelt on, right Lamont?” Conrad’s eyes were flicking from road to sky above.

“Yeah,” she said, “But—"

Conrad slammed on the brakes sending them all jolting forward as the car squealed to a stop. Lamont heard the dull smack of a forehead on the dashboard, followed by hoarse swearing.

“Christ, give a man some damn warnin’!”

Worth was rubbing his forehead with one hand, but the other was reaching automatically for his gun.

In a second the two of them were shoving open their doors and sliding out into the night. Lamont reached for her handle too, when Conrad’s head reappeared around the headrest.

“You stay in here, okay?” He looked distracted, his eyes darting around, never actually falling on her. He was digging around under his seat for his pistol case. “We’re going to go check it out.”

“I’ll come too.”

“No,” he said firmly. The pistols were two flashes of moonlight in his hands as he backed out of the car. “You’ll stay here and we’ll be right back. I’m serious, do _not_ get out of the car, okay?”

The door shut before she could protest, leaving her alone in the dark. Lamont scowled and tried the handle. The door didn’t budge. Dammit. Conrad must have turned on the child locks.

She glared at him through the darkened window as he and Worth moved into position, back to back in the middle of the road, scanning corners of the dark her (mostly) human eyes couldn’t perceive.

Except that this time, for some reason, she could.

That same scratchy shape was scrawling through the air in the distant sky, but now she could identify the individual components as feathers and beaks and talons, a cloud of sharp edges and blackness that drank in the moonlight, not reflecting a drop. Neither Conrad nor Worth seemed to have noticed it yet.

Lamont pounded the window.

“Hey! HEY!” she shouted, jabbing a finger at the glass in the direction of the dark shape. “Look out!”

Their eyes snapped over to her and then, a second too late, toward the swarm of feathers screaming through the air toward him.

Lamont heard the muffled sound of Worth swearing as he wheeled the nose of the shotgun up toward the center of the cloud, firing off two quick shots. The flock scattered, then reformed, banking sharply and making a direct line for Conrad’s head, who whipped out of the way just in time.

It was Conrad’s turn to take aim at the screeching shape, blowing through the few at the head of the charge. The few he hit exploded in puffs of black feathers that seethed into smoke before they touched the ground. It was hardly a dent in their total number though—the rest of the swarm darted out of the line of fire, ebbing and reforming like water.

Conrad and Worth wheeled around, firing haphazard shots into the dark shape that refused to be aimed at or pinned down. This wasn’t working.

Heart hammering, Lamont scrambled over the back of the seat, dangling her upper half into the trunk space in the back. Their clothes and supplies were buried under a mess of empty water jugs and plastic bags smeared with blood and a handful of weapons tossed hurriedly in the back in their rush to get on the road. Weapons, she hoped, that might be better suited to defending from airborne melee attacks than their guns.

After a moment of sifting through the mess, she found the rubber grip of the tire iron and yanked it free.

It tingled uncomfortably in her hands. All three of them, unfortunately, were about as vulnerable to iron and crosses as the beings they used the things against. Lamont could stand iron better than Conrad or Worth, but crosses always gave her the uncomfortable, staticky feeling of being a little too close to a live wire. The rubber dulled the worst of it, but she could still feel the current humming just on the other side.

Conrad and Worth were ducking and running and shooting and, tire iron in hand, she yanked at the door handle one more time. It held firm. She cursed.

She could clamber up over the center console and out through the driver’s side door, but the risk of burning a finger clean off in the process of maneuvering with the iron in hand was a bit high for her taste, especially with her hands thick and adrenaline-clumsy as they were. There was something she could try though…

She had done it only once or twice in the months since she had, quite by accident, simply vanished from Bible study and reappeared in the woods half a mile away. It had nearly given John a heart attack and he’d made her swear up and down she wouldn’t try it again. She hadn’t intended on keeping that promise, per se, but she still had never done it on purpose before. If there was ever a time, though…

Lamont closed her eyes and reached out with her mind, trying to remember how she’d done it before. She let her consciousness unfurl out from her body, feeling along the space around her, not completely sure what she was looking for. It caught in the tiniest ridge, a sliver. That seemed right. She took a deep breath and turned.

For the briefest moment she had the impression of something like leaves rustling, or maybe a hiss of hundreds of quiet voices overlapping, of willow branches whipping whisper-soft over her cheeks and she seemed to move as if through water. Then the air went snap-cool around her. She opened her eyes.

She was standing in front of an empty photo-printing shop she remembered driving past just a few moments before. Well, she was out of the car at least, but she’d overshot by quite a bit. Conrad and Worth and the cloud of bird-creatures were mere silhouettes in the moonlight several yards away. She swore and took off running toward them.

“Worth!” she shouted as she reached the edge of the block. He whipped around toward the sound of her voice.

“The fuck—?”

The birds took advantage of his moment of distraction to very nearly bowl him over. He ducked, struggling to train the nose of his gun into the heart of the swarm on unsteady feet. Lamont scrambled forward and swung hard with the iron, tearing a jagged slice through the flock and sending a number of them screeching into clouds of smoke and feathers.

Worth staggered to his feet. Lamont could hear the pop of Conrad’s pistols on the other side of the SUV. The swarm had divided, apparently, in an attempt to drive them apart, overwhelm them separately.

“Catch!”

She tossed the iron in Worth’s direction. He caught it smoothly by the rubber handle and came out swinging. His half of the flock fizzled, scattered, reformed, and she took off toward the other half of the flock, pulling the knives out of her pocket. This was it. That was the chance she’d been waiting for. She flicked out both blades as she rounded the roaring haze of beaks and feathers, catching flashes of Conrad’s guns and hair on the other side.

“Hey!” she shouted triumphantly.

The swarm swiveled toward her. She dove right into the heart of it, knives gleaming.

One knife caught birdflesh and slipped right out of her hand. She fumbled the second in her effort to recapture the first, sending them both clattering to the pavement. Shit.

Black, corvid eyes were fixed on her now and the cloud surged toward her. Lamont stumbled back, bumping up against the cold metal of the car, her eyes fixed on their dark talons, their cruel beaks, when…

The flock scattered, screeching, as a tire iron cut through them. Worth’s face—or part of his face anyway, his humanity simmering at the edges, mouth stretching into a toothy grimace, skin evaporating from his bones—swam out of the haze of smoke and feathers.

Lamont ducked as Worth swung again, carving another jagged arc through the flock. She dropped to the ground, hands flying over asphalt until she located her knives. She stood quickly and turned back to the creatures, blades out, adrenaline singing through her veins.

But it was too late.

The liquid haze of birds reformed again but had not gone in for another attack. Instead they spiraled up, high over their heads, a vortex of feathers and smoke.

“Oh no ya fuckin’ don’t,” Worth’s voice hissed from the creature of wicked, gleaming edges that stood where he had been. In a flash, he was gone, taking off in the direction of the swarm flapping into the darkness.

The night was suddenly silent, devoid of gunshots and animal screeching. The blades hung limply in her hands and the pounding in her ears was all Lamont could hear.

For a second, anyway.

“I thought I told you to stay in the car!”

Lamont snapped out of her daze to see Conrad, red-faced, furious, and stalking toward her. She scowled right back, fear and guilt and frustration congealing into thick, viscous anger.

“Yeah and if I had, you would have gotten your heads eaten by those things,” she snapped. “You’re welcome by the way.”

“Every time!” Conrad was waving his hands in the air, “Every SINGLE time I try to keep things safe and sane, it all goes to hell. Why can’t you just listen to me for ONCE?”

“You should have just let me come in the first place!” she was shouting back now. “If I hadn’t showed up—”

_“If ya hadn’t showed up, we mighta killed the damn things!”_

Worth was stepping out of the darkness behind them. He’d simmered back into his usual shape, but somehow looked hardly less vicious.

Worth didn’t get red-faced and flustered the way Conrad did when he was angry. His face, instead, assumed a terrifying masklike quality, totally stiff, frozen with rage. His eyes glittered blackly in the moonlight.

That actually gave her pause, the retort that had been forming on her lips dying swiftly. He practically flashstepped over to her, looming a clean foot over her head.

“What kinda damn _idiot_ move was that, huh?” he demanded, his face twisted with fury. “What th’ _fuck_ did ya think ya were doin’? Runnin’ out here half-cocked like a fuckin’ moron!”

“I was just—”

“Ya were just tryin’a get yerself killed is what!” he jabbed a finger at her chest, sending her stumbling back a little bit. “Did ya have _any_ idea what those things were or how ta kill ‘em? Any kinda plan at all?”

Lamont opened and closed her mouth silently. Conrad had melted back into the darkness, apparently letting Worth take this one and turning his energy to recovering spilled bullets and searching for any survivors. She doubted he would have much luck. The things seemed to move entirely as one—anything left breathing would have taken off with the flock.

“No, ya didn’t,” Worth growled. Somehow, he looked about twice as tall as usual like this, drawn up to his full height and positively seething. “And if we didn’t hafta stop what we were doin’ ta cover yer ass we mighta finished the job. _We_ know how ta handle our damn selves. _You_ don’t know one damn end’a these things from the other.”

In an instant, he plucked the knives from her hands one after the other, ignoring the angry red burn that bubbled up on the pads of his fingers where they made contact with the blade. He grabbed her collar, dragging her bodily back to the SUV before she could protest and ripped the door open. She found herself tumbling, headlong into the backseat.

The door slammed behind her and for a long moment she sat there frozen and red faced, anger and embarrassment eating their way up her throat. The passenger door opened and Worth flung himself into the car, Conrad sliding into the driver’s side after him.

“Never took ya fer stupid, kid, but that was the stupidest shit I’ve seen in a long time,” he spat, and it hit her like hot tar.

“Let’s just get to Hanna,” Conrad said grimly, starting the car back up. “I have a feeling this isn’t the last we’ll be seeing of whatever those were.”

*   *   *

They spent the rest of the ride in simmering silence as they wound through the city streets, following the blinking of the rune and the growing density of lit windows and front lawns converted into neat but scrappy-looking gardens. Lamont was still seething, throat scratchy when the SUV screeched to a halt.

They were in front of an unassuming townhouse that looked about the same as the rest of the lightly-lived-in residences on the street. It would have been unexceptional except for the familiar RV parked out front and a looping scrawl of sigils snaking up either side of the doorway, written in a hand she’d recognize anywhere.

Sure enough, no sooner had Conrad clicked the engine off, a shock of red hair appeared in the doorway, and Hanna bounded, grinning, down the stairs toward them.

Lamont wasn’t in the mood to talk. To do anything, really. She wanted to be left alone, to lick her wounds in peace, maybe find a nice, out-of-the-way wall to put her fist through. But Hanna was an unstoppable force, and she had spent enough time with him to know there was no getting out of it when his inertia was pointed your way.

She took a deep breath, swallowed hard, and pushed the door open. Her feet hardly hit the ground before she was swept up in a lung-crushing embrace.

“Montyyyyy!” She could practically hear the smile in Hanna’s voice “Oh man, it’s so good to see you! It’s been too long! How’s my favorite niece doing?”

“I’m good, Uncle Hanna.”

Her hands hadn’t quite stopped shaking, but she found she was smiling a little in spite of herself and hugging him back. She wasn’t usually much of a hugger, but Uncle Hanna just had that kind of effect. Besides, this was probably the longest she’d ever gone without seeing him, and she couldn’t pretend like she hadn’t missed him.

“You’ve grown like a foot since I saw you last, dude! You’re gonna be taller than me soon!” He released her finally, looking her up and down. Sure enough, she realized, she was nearly shoulder to shoulder with him now, where six months ago she certainly hadn’t been. “Not that that’s saying much, haha. But I bet you could give Conrad a run for his money in another year or two! Probably not Worth though, unless you’re really lucky. Or unlucky. Depends on your perspective, I guess. Does that school of yours in Tallahassee have a basketball team? Worth-level height would be _super_ useful for that…”

Conrad was unloading the back of the car and Worth was hovering irritably, tapping out a cigarette from the pack in his pocket. Lamont stayed right where she was and waited for Hanna to talk himself out. She’d learned not to try to answer any of Uncle Hanna’s individual questions until he hit his second wind.

Uncle…Something was walking out of the house now too as Hanna turned away from her and took off down the rest of the stairs to greet Conrad and Worth. His green lips quirked into something she recognized as a smile, and he nodded. She smiled and nodded back. He wasn’t nearly so energetic in his welcomes as Hanna, but his friendly reserve was more of a welcome break from the tightly wound energy of the rest of the family more than anything.

“Lamont,” the deader of her uncles said, sauntering to a stop beside her. “It’s wonderful to see you again. As Hanna said, it’s been too long. I missed you.”

“Woah, what happened to you guys?”

Lamont’s reply froze on her lips and she turned to see Hanna looking dumbly between Conrad and Worth. They were both more than a little soot-covered and scraped-up from their earlier run-in. Conrad glared, shouldering their bags and slamming the trunk shut.

“Got fuckin’ ambushed is what happened,” Worth growled, stalking around the side of the car toward him. Conrad said nothing to that, so Lamont guessed the moratorium on swearing had officially come to an end. Day and a half—that had to be some kind of record. “Tall, dark, and feathery? Crazy fuckin’ flock’a crows? Ring a bell? Or did they just happen ta be passin’ through on the damn Night of the Livin’ Dead?"

“I think you mean Day of the Dead,” Hanna corrected, “And right now it’s…” he checked his watch “…okay it’s juuuuust after midnight, so technically, yes, it’s Halloween, but Day of the Dead is traditionally celebrated on November first, so you’d still be wrong. But yeah, about that…”

Conrad and Worth shot him identically murderous looks. Hanna grimaced and cast his eyes upward, nervously scanning the star-freckled sky.

“We should probably get inside before I tell you any more.”

 

“Okay, out with it, Hanna,” Conrad demanded once they were through the door, putting a fist on his cocked hip in a way that was probably meant to be intimidating. Lamont and Worth rolled their eyes almost in unison. Worth didn’t notice. Lamont did. “What are those things?”

The bit of the house they could see was little more than a hallway and a staircase up to what Lamont assumed were bedrooms. There was a set of double doors to the left of the entrance, and Lamont could see light and shadows moving underneath it, hear the thrum of hushed voices. A plump, friendly-faced woman had greeted them on their way in before bustling away into what looked to Lamont like a cramped little kitchen in the back.

Lamont plopped herself down on the stairs. Now that the adrenaline had flushed out of her system, she was feeling sluggish and exhausted, more miserable than angry. Still a little angry though. She flashed another irritable look at Worth, who was leaning against the bannister, arms crossed.

“Yeah, sorry about that,” Hanna said, wringing his hands. “They’re one of those Bloody Mary types. Yanno, say her name three times in the mirror and she shows up? Speak of the devil and the devil will appear? When you talk about them, they come flocking—no pun intended. I’ve got enough sigils up on the house that we should be safe for now though.”

“What a _re_ they, Hanna?” Conrad repeated.

“Sluagh Sidhe.”

Worth sniffed. “Gesundheit.”

“No, no, it’s Gaelic!” Hanna was turning toward Uncle… “Yama, do you have that—ah! Yeah, here it is.”

Uncle Yama had procured a thick, leather-bound tome apparently from thin air. Hanna took the book from the zombie’s hands and flipped it open to an ancient, dog eared page. He jabbed a finger at a wood block print of what looked to be a swarm of crows.

“Also known as the Fairy Host,” he said. “To some crusty old Scottish dudes anyway. They’re not really fairies. Pretty terrible hosts, too.”

“Wait, wait, wait,” Conrad looked, if possible, angrier than before. “Is this another…this is another Wild Hunt thing, isn’t it Hanna? No. No, no, no, and no. We’ve done that before and I’m putting my foot down. Never again. The first time was enough of a nightmare.”

“Awww, Connie, yer tellin’ me ya ain’t just achin’ to relive that romantic night’a bondin’?”

“No,” Conrad said dryly. “Not particularly”

Hanna was waving his arms anxiously.

“Totally not a Wild Hunt thing, bro! I mean, okay, according to some folklore, I guess yes, technically. But they’re a totally different dealie-o! Humans see a bunch of supernatural beings in a group and assume they’re all the same,” Hanna sighed. “Some kinds of prejudice just don’t die, I guess. But anyway, no, this group is less of an ‘angry Fey out for blood’ deal and more of a ‘lost human souls doomed to roam the earth’ type deal. These guys used to be humans, just really bad humans. The Wild Hunt is all Fey, all the time.”

Conrad looked unconvinced. Worth was just watching with an eyebrow raised, chewing a crumbling, unlit cigarette.

“The Sluagh Sidhe are bad news, but they’re a piece of cake compared to the Wild Hunt,” Hanna insisted. “They mostly like to kidnap sick kids and kill crops and things like that. They’ll eat livestock left outside at night sometimes too, but these were real jerks when they were alive, so we can’t expect them to be much better now that they’re dead, I guess.”

“So,” Worth said through grit teeth. “Ghosts, is what yer tellin’ me basically.”

Hanna grinned guiltily up at him. Lamont flicked her eyes up from the floor, suddenly interested.

“Errr, yeah basically, sorrydon’thurtmeeeee…”

Worth glared.

“You remember what you told me about ghosts?”

“Uh huh. Sure seems like you don’t, though.”

“Yeah, yeah, no ghosts, BUT!” Hanna stuck a finger in the air. “You also said if I was gonna be dealing with ghosts to call you so you could kill me first!”

Worth’s glare didn’t let up.

“So I called! Haha…ha…”

Conrad crossed his arms. Hanna slumped.

“Okay, so basically I could super use your guys’ help with this,” he admitted. “The city is supposed to be officially chartered today and there’s gonna be a whole shindig tomorrow night to celebrate. You know,” he gestured vaguely, “goodwill among men and the Moonlight Races and all that. Honestly, it’s been a hell of a time convincing the humans around here to recognize the treaty in any kind of official way but tomorrow was supposed to seal the deal.”

He grinned weakly and motioned to the book.

“Enter, Sluagh Sidhe! Making a mess of everyone’s crops and swooping in through windows to scare babies and generally being a big pain in my ass.”

Hanna ran a hand through his hair and Yama put a sympathetic hand on his shoulder. “They haven’t been able to pull off anything too awful yet, they only showed up a few days ago, but it’s seriously undermining all the humans’ trust in the supernatural side of things holding up their end. I’ve tried explaining that they’re a rogue operation but…” Hanna shook his head. “Not all that convincing when they keep trying to whisk away babies with the flu.”

“So what do you need us for?” Conrad was looking less angry now, but more suspicious, arms crossed, foot tapping.

“Well,” Hanna went on, “it’s basically all diplomatic types and nervous civilians in town right now. Not exactly who you want at your back in a fight, especially on Halloween. It seemed safest to call in the cavalry for the old POW-BOOM-KACHOW!”

He mimed a few swipes with his fists, aimed his finger like a gun right at Conrad and Worth, who were looking worn and irritable respectively.

“Please?” he said, wide-eyed. “This charter thing isn’t gonna work out unless the humans have a little faith in us. Plus, you guys are gonna be wayyyyy better at taking them down than me. You know…already being dead and all. They can’t exactly steal your souls.”

Hanna let out a nervous giggle. Worth spit out a mouthful of cigarette paper. Lamont held her breath.

“Feh,” Worth said finally. “Fine. But only since I know ya’d get yer damn self killed doin’ it alone.”

Conrad sighed and pinched the bridge of his nose.

“Yeah,” he relented. “Sure, whatever. We’re already here aren’t we? Let’s hunt some goddamn ghosts on goddamn Halloween.”

“Yayyyyy!”

Hanna pulled them both into a tight hug that they both looked less than enthusiastic about.

“You guys are the best. It’ll be just like old times!” Worth shot him a look. “Well, not _too_ much like old times…”

And then they were bustling away, Hanna with an arm around each of them and Yama hovering after and Lamont, feeling distinctly forgotten about, planted on the stairs.

“There’s a room for you upstairs,” Uncle Yama was saying to her from the double doors that had now swung open to reveal a candlelit study and a table covered in papers and metal instruments. “First door on the right. I left a few books there I thought you might like. Why don’t you go get settled in?”

But Lamont was still watching Worth and Conrad, who were now following Hanna into the candlelit room. The two of them were still glowering at Hanna but exchanged a look over his head, the meaning of which Lamont couldn’t divine. It sent something twanging deep in her chest.

The two of them were like a pair of binary stars. Always in step, always in orbit. Even when they were fighting, they had a language of their own Lamont couldn’t speak, a rhythm she couldn’t quite figure out how to fall in line with. A closed orbit of two. Lamont remembered the look Worth had given her out in the street and had the sudden sensation of being a cold, distant exoplanet, miles away from their light.

“Let me come too.”

Lamont realized she was standing, fists clenched, on the bottom step. Conrad stopped in the doorway, scowl falling away. Worth stopped too, and even Hanna turned back around, his chatter dying abruptly.

“No.”

Lamont blinked. It took her a moment to realize that Worth was the one who had spoken. He hadn’t even changed his expression, just shifted the cigarette from one side of his mouth to the other.

“Yer not comin’.”

“I can help.” She felt her nails digging little moons into her palms. “You said they’re restless spirits, right? I was able to spot them out there before either of you. Maybe I can talk to them, convince them to leave peacefully. Maybe even release them! Hanna always says it’s always best to start with diplomacy.”

Hanna lit up, but Conrad shook his head and Worth scowled.

“Yeah, an’ Hanna’s an idiot who’s nearly gotten us all killed more times than this guy’s got stitches,” he gestured to Uncle Yama.

“Hey, I’ve gotten you all saved a few times too!”

But Conrad glared at him and he deflated a bit.

“Okay, okay,” Hanna turned a guilty smile toward Lamont. “I love the spirit, Monty, but yeaaaaah, I’ve gotta side with Worth and Con-man on this one. I’m glad you haven’t inherited Worth’s guns blazing, shoot first ask questions later attitude, but this could require some tricky magic and yeah, probably some actually shooting. If anything happened to you, these guys would tear me a new you-know-what.”

“We definitely would,” Conrad agreed. “Look, Lamont, I know you think you can help but—”

“I _can_ help,” Lamont countered stubbornly. “Just let me come along, I won’t get in the way. Come on, you’ve gotta start taking me out on real jobs sooner or later!”

“Sooner or later, yes. Tonight, hell no.”

“Let. Me. Come.”

“Ya ain’t comin’!” Worth cut in. “Yer sittin’ yer ass in this house ‘til sunup and you ain’t doin’ anything stupid!”

Lamont tried to set her jaw as Worth stalked up to her, tried to glare back as fiercely as he was glaring at her.

“But—”

“But _nothin’_! Ya ain’t gettin’ in our way again, ya hear me?”

“Worth…”

Conrad was at his side now. His voice was gentler now, with a quelling sort of intonation. He touched Worth’s arm and gave him another one of those looks Lamont couldn’t quite understand. Wide, brown eyes peeked around the kitchen doorway and Hanna and Yama were hovering in the background, the former gaping openmouthed and the latter watching grimly. Worth didn’t stop.

“Ya already just about got us all killed once tonight, or did ya forget already? We ain’t luggin’ yer dead weight along and we sure as hell ain’t lettin’ you in spittin’ distance of any ghosts.”

Lamont’s face was hot and she felt like she had swallowed a mouthful of staples and her vision was tunneling. Worth had been towering over her a moment before, but it seemed like he was getting smaller, further away somehow.

“I’m not going to get in the way! I’m not some useless kid!”

“We know you’re not, Lamont, please, calm—"

“I’m coming with you!”

“Yer not!” Worth was shouting now, pointing an accusing finger at her. “And flyin’ around ain’t gonna change my mind either.”

She realized suddenly that her feet head lost contact with the ground and he was hovering several inches above his head. Shit, she hadn’t levitated on accident in ages. Just when she thought she was getting better control…

“Yer stayin’,” Worth said with an air of finality. “Now get yer ass upstairs before I dump ya there my goddamn self.”

She bit her lip hard, fighting back angry tears.

Typical. So _fucking_ typical. Just Worth and Conrad against the world, yet again, and her stuck on the sidelines. She wasn’t a little kid anymore, and yeah, sure, maybe most human kids her age still were, but she wasn’t _like_ them and they still didn’t get that. They didn’t get her. They didn’t even _want_ to. Sometimes it seemed like they didn’t even want her around at all.

As if reading her thoughts, Worth gave her a cold look and said, “Shoulda left ya in Tallahassee when we had the chance.”

She gave a scream of frustration and the glass bookcase under the stairs cracked, sending glass spinning over the floor. Across the hall, a vase toppled over and the curtains fluttered in the windows.

Conrad opened his mouth to say something, but Lamont grit her teeth and spun around, toes skimming over the steps as she stormed upstairs.

“Sorry, Monty!” Hanna’s voice called up after her. “Don’t be mad! Maybe next time!”

*   *   *

She didn’t turn the light on, just threw herself into bed and put all her energy into keeping herself from floating off of it and into the rafters.

Lamont hated being like this. Frantic and angry and out of control. She hadn’t meant to break anything down there either, but it had all happened so fast. Blood pounded in her head. If they would just listen to her, if they could just see that she could handle herself if she had half a chance…

About fifteen long minutes of simmering and half-wondering if she could actually glare a hole in the wall if she tried hard enough passed when the door creaked open.

She didn’t look up, but she recognized the sound of Conrad’s shoes on the floor, his weight settling at the end of the bed. She definitely recognized the sigh that followed.

“He doesn’t mean it, you know. He worries about you, that’s all.”

Lamont didn’t turn around, just tightened her arms around herself and glared more pointedly at the peeling wallpaper. “Then let me come.”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“Because I happen to agree with him.”

 _That_ had her sitting up, wheeling her glare around to fall squarely on him. Conrad didn’t flinch.

“He was being a jerk, but that doesn’t mean he was wrong. This is too dangerous, and you’ve never even been on a real mission yet.”

“That’s not _my_ fault.”

“No, but there’s a reason we haven’t taken you.”

Lamont screwed her face up. “Because you two don’t want me around.”

Conrad threw his hands up in exasperation.

“Because you’re _seven,_ Lamont!” he groaned. “Haven’t you noticed that other kids your age are still playing with dolls and trains? Give yourself some time!”

“I’m not like them!” She was shouting again, and that feeling of having gargled staples was creeping back into her throat. “You know I’m not like them, and you don’t want me around anyway! I wish you would just…I don’t know!”

She drew her knees up close to her chest and buried her face.

“I just wish you guys treated me like I was part of the family,” she mumbled into her jeans.

She swallowed hard. She wasn’t going to cry. Not now. Not in front of Conrad. That definitely wouldn’t help make her point.

She heard him sigh and shift slightly on the bed.

“I get it, you know,” he said quietly.

“How could you possibly get it?” her voice came out muffled by her jeans. He was silent for a long moment.

“Back when I first met Worth and Hanna and Yama,” he continued finally, “I was _by far_ the most inexperienced one on the team. And the most expendable. For a long time after, too. I mean, I was a vampire! I should have been able to keep up with the rest of them no problem, but I just…couldn’t.”

Lamont peeked up at him over her arm. He was looking at the floor, the light from the hallway flashing his glasses white with glare, obscuring his eyes.

“They were always trying to leave me out or leave me behind and it…it drove me crazy. It sucked.” He inhaled a deep breath. “But in hindsight, if I’d gone along with them on some of those early trips like I’d wanted to, I would have gotten my a—uh, I mean…I would have been in big trouble. I didn’t know enough yet. I didn’t have enough control over my abilities. And neither do you.”

Lamont scowled again and turned away from him.

“You’ll get there one day,” he said, placing a hand gingerly on her arm. “I know you will. But for now, the best place for you to be is home.”

She let the silence stretch, grow thin and brittle like cooling glass. Conrad sighed again. His hand disappeared and she was alone, once again, on the bed.

“We’re going to head out soon, once Hanna gets the plan all ironed out. We’ll be back in a few hours. There’s food downstairs if you’re hungry, and Hanna’s friend Caroline will be around if you need anything. Just try not to sulk all night, okay?”

The door creaked and floorboards groaned as he hesitated in the doorway.

“Love you.”

She squeezed her arms tighter around herself. The door clicked shut.

The second Conrad disappeared she unfurled herself and chucked a pillow at the door. The little stack of books Yama had left on her bedside toppled onto the floor after it, spines flashing titles that sounded like parasitic plants and distant stars. Xenogenesis. Abhorsen. Tehanu.

Her blood was boiling, and she realized with another groan of frustration that she was levitating again.

Conrad’s voice flashed, unbidden to her mind.

_“…didn’t have enough control over my abilities…”_

Lamont grit her teeth and slammed her feet back into the floor as hard as she could. They buckled under her, sending her toppling and cursing to the ground.

A dark-eyed girl in flowing robes stared piercingly up at her from the cover of one of the books on the floor. Lamont flipped it over.

Stupid Conrad. Stupid Worth. What did they know? Stupid Yama and Hanna for bringing them here too. She almost wished she was back home with John and Amelia. John who didn’t make demands of her, who took her to church on Sundays and let her watch old VHS tapes on Saturday mornings as long as she kept her powers in check around the house. Amelia who read her books and taught her to bake bread.

A different voice echoed in her head.

 _“_ … _shoulda left ya in Tallahassee when we had the chance…”_

She stood up quickly, fists clenched.

Screw it. Screw them for trying to leave her out all the time. For acting like she wasn’t just as much one of the team as the rest of them. She wasn’t a young Conrad, fresh from a comfortable, mortal life as a graphic designer. She had grown up in this. She’d spent her whole life with infernal blood in her veins, sitting in on treaty meetings, having dinner with the forces of heaven and hell and everything in between, watching her family negotiate with Fey and solve territory disputes with werewolves.

She belonged out there. And she would prove it to them.

Tightening her laces and zipping up her hoodie, she went to the door, listened for signs of life or unlife waiting outside. Satisfied she was alone, she slipped out into the hall.

The muffled chatter continued from the other side of the study door downstairs, light and shadows moving under it. Clattering, scraping noises were coming from the kitchen. Lamont peered over the bannister for a moment, then crept down the stairs, stepping as lightly as she could.

Their bags were still slumped by the door where Conrad had left them. She flipped them open one after another. Here was the backpack for hers and Worth’s clothes, the duffle for Conrad’s, the leather bag of medical supplies, the tote of silver and salt and other tradeables that that brought along everywhere, just in case. Aaaand jackpot.

An assortment of guns, knives, and variously safety-proofed iron objects gleamed out of the last suitcase. Her hands fluttered over them, unsure of where to start.

Last time Worth had let her try his shotgun she’d landed flat on her ass, so she’d leave those well enough alone. Pistols and revolvers wouldn’t have nearly the firepower needed to clear those things out, and the tire iron was still in the back of the car. Near the bottom of the bag was an iron crowbar with a rubber grip though, and that was close enough, she supposed. As she was disentangling it from the case, she noticed something else: the handles of her knives, sticking haphazardly like chopsticks out from an outer pocket. She snatched them up, triumphant.

“Okay, everyone ready?”

Hanna’s voice was suddenly loud and clear across the hall and Lamont’s head went up like a startled prairie dog. The light under the study door had gone dark, as if something or someone was blocking it. She froze as the handle began to turn.

She would have liked to hunt for more weapons, maybe grab some salt just in case. No time for that now. No time for anything now. There was no way she would make it out the door before getting caught and she sure as hell wasn’t heading back upstairs. She had to get out, quickly.

Lamont sucked in a deep breath as the door creaked open and cast her mind out into the folds of the air around her. It caught in a sliver, a crack. She lifted a foot…

A whooshing, whipping, whispering—then cold.

She opened her eyes and blinked in the sudden darkness.

She had no idea where the hell she was.

The light from the lamps in the house seared little purple shadows onto the back of her eyes, but that was the only trace of unnatural light left. The grimace of the moon backlit the same skyline she’d driven into less than an hour ago, but the angle was all off, the street that now stretched out around her lined with gutted houses, not a garden or a candle or a protective rune in sight. None of it was familiar.

She stuffed the knives in her pocket and held tight to the crowbar. She took a deep breath to steady her nerves.

This was a win. This was what she’d wanted, right? All alone, ready to take on the goddamn Fairy Host. On Halloween.

A bat screeched overhead. She decided to take that as a sign.

“Alright,” her voice echoed in the empty street. “Sluagh Sidhe! Restless spirits! I call you down!”

There was silence. Chilly wind bristled the hairs of her arms.

“Faery Host,” she tried again, trying to keep the nervous bite out of her voice. “Hostess with the mostess…”

She adjusted her grip on the crowbar.

“Sluagh Sidhe! Come on down and face me!”

 _Now_ she was hearing something. Wings rustled overhead, whispers scraping through the glassy air and she whipped around, holding the crowbar high.

The flock of feathers and black eyes that didn’t reflect the light was gathering again overhead like a storm. Lamont licked her lips, stepping back as more and more birds swooped in to circle overhead. She raised both hands toward the flock in what she hoped read as a conciliatory gesture.

“Can you talk?” she yelled, feeling suddenly pretty stupid. How did Hanna usually do these things? She wished she’d had time to grab a rune or two, or at least some salt for a circle. The flock was getting bigger. She planted her feet and tried to look more confident than she felt.

“Sluagh Sidhe! You’ve gotta tell me what you want or you’re gonna have to get the hell out of this town, because you won’t be hunting any more souls as long as I’m here.”

She could see the black of their moonless eyes as the flock converged high, high in the cloudless dark. They dove.

Lamont stumbled back, but they jetted right past her as if they weren’t aiming for her at all. She saw that the birds were no longer a formless flock, but seemed to be congealing into a singular, more coherent shape. A silhouette, vaguely human, its head vaguely corvid, came into focus, all beaks and wings and smoke. It fixed on her with the dead eyes of a predator.

“I don’t want to hurt you again, but I will if I have to!” Lamont tried again, holding the crowbar firm, but careful not to look too threatening just yet. “Come on, let’s make a deal. You’re gonna get driven out of this town one way or another, so why not get something you want out of it? What do you want?”

The clicking of beaks and flutter of wings seemed to rasp out something that sounded almost like human language.

_“We seek souls to join our watch.”_

“Okay, yeah, that’s definitely not happening,” she ran her free hand through her hair. “Anything else? Come on, I’ve got friends in high places, try me. My dads kinda helped ratify the treaty. Sort of. I mean my uncle definitely did, but they were still there. Come on, help me out, I’m trying to keep you from getting used for target practice.”

But the creatures seemed not to be listening, the scribbled edges of the figure fraying, unfolding.

_“You will join us too.”_

The Host dove as one. Lamont had a fraction of a second to duck as a volley of beaks and claws sliced through the spot where her head had just been. She felt the tips of feathers rustle her hair. Okay fine, that was how they wanted to play it, she was game.

The flock converged again, banking as it turned back for another attack.

 _“Spawn of hell,”_ it rasped, _“you are one of us.”_

It dove again, but this time she was ready. The crowbar sliced clean through the center in a puff of smoke and feathers.

“Yeah,” her mouth was a grim line, “not the first time I’ve heard that one.”

The Sluagh Sidhe coasted and sliced past her and screeched overhead, and for a glorious moment she almost felt like she found her footing. Her crowbar was singing through birdflesh and smoke and she almost felt like she’d gotten into a kind of groove, when she realized that the shape swooping behind her was… a lot smaller than she remembered.

She turned on her heel, wheeling back just as the other half of the Host came screeching out of the darkness behind her. The crowbar tumbled out of her hand, bouncing out into the street, and she went right down too.

Shit.

She hissed. They had caught the side of her head and asphalt skinned her palms as she hit the ground and rolled into the grass on the side of the road. She lay there for a moment, dazed, feeling blood trickle past her eye, before she realized that the Host hadn’t stopped to take a break.

They were swirling overhead, a gathering storm. She rolled onto her back and fumbled in her pockets, watching wide-eyed as the Host seemed to take a collective breath, before they were diving straight for her. Come on, come on, come on…

The blades were open in an instant and she threw her hands up, clanging the knives together into a perfect icon cross in front of her face.

The Host bounced off the cross like it was a glass window and scattered, screeching and collapsing into clouds of smoke, giving her just enough time to push herself up onto her feet and take off down the street.

She pounded the pavement, the Sluagh Sidhe screaming down the street after her, getting closer and closer. Stupid, how could she have been so stupid? She lost her weapon when it counted again, she got backed into a corner again, and she was stuck, again, needing dad to save her.

She reached out with her mind as the birds closed in behind her, catching in the first ridge she found and then…

She was stumbling over uneven sidewalk, apartment complexes towering overhead, blotting out the moon.

She found another crevice.

She was trampling over ashes and burnt brick, the grinning moon bearing down overhead.

Her mind slipped through another crack.

She was sliding, nearly tumbling down a steep set of stairs down into what looked like a long-abandoned industrial complex.

The last fold practically pulled her into its embrace.

She was on her knees, wheezing into overgrown grass.

Her head whipped around frantically, searching for her pursuers, but the sky was now clear of bird-shaped spirits, free from flapping wings and smoke and beady eyes. For now, at least.

Rows of squat little houses stretched down either side of the street. The city skyline still held against the moon when she looked up, so she couldn’t have gotten too far, but these houses too seemed uninhabited. The flicker of firelit windows in the heart of the city was invisible from here.

Lamont dragged herself to her feet, looking around. She realized, belatedly, that her hands were slightly singed from handling a cross unprotected, and that she’d lost both of her knives somewhere between jumps. Blood still drip, drip, dripped over her eyebrow.

“Conrad? Worth?” Her voice skittered into the dark, sounding shrill and panicky even to her ears. “Dad!”

No voice, no curl of smoke or gleam of teeth in the dark answered.

The Host wouldn’t be thrown off her scent for long, and now she was injured and weaponless. She needed to find a safe place to hide out until the sunrise, or until Conrad and Worth figured out she was gone and hunted her down. She hoped the second would come first. She didn’t look forward to trying to find her own way home while they were out of action for the day.

Blood grew sticky and hard on her skin as she limped through the street, too quiet, too dark.

Maybe she would get lucky and stumble across some hermit who preferred the comfort and nostalgia of residential areas to the safety in numbers that came with living in the heart of the city. Or some other moonlighter out for a late-night stroll while the diplomats did their thing elsewhere in town.

None such luck on either count. But she did spot the next best thing.

At the end of the street was a broad, flat building that she might not have even recognized for a church if it wasn’t for the grimy, peeling sign on the front lawn reading “U ited Met odi t Churc .” If there had ever been a cross out front, someone had made off with it long ago, leaving the building looking hollow and unassuming. Around the side of the church, she recognized with a thrill of relief, was a stretch of lawn sprung up with headstones and fenced in by a low, stone wall.

She could have kissed the crabgrass-infested ground. Conrad had always told her when she was little that if they got separated, get to the nearest cemetery and they would come find her. She limped across the street, adrenaline fading, replaced with the sting of broken skin, the throb of blood in her head, wondering just how many cemeteries they could check before the sun came up.

*   *   *

Most humans Lamont met still had an instinctive nervousness around graveyards. Ironically, they were actually just about the safest places you could be from most varieties of restless spirit. Something to do with the whole hallowed ground thing—ghosts, ghouls, and other spectral beings had a hell of a time getting their bearings on blessed earth.

So she stayed planted on the stone wall of the cemetery with her knees to her chest, unwilling to venture any further in or out of its protective radius. Not because graveyards made her nervous—just the opposite, usually. But because she’d forgotten that technically, it was Halloween, and the dead were in a much better mood about it than she was.

She hadn’t noticed the shadowy shimmer of echoes unfurling from gravestones, simmering in the darkness of the lawn until she’d reached the gate, at which point she’d turned heel and perched herself as far on the outskirts of the festivities as she could get. Lamont usually liked speaking to echoes of the dead. They weren’t like ghosts, all hollow and haunted and rattling around the physical realm like orphaned maracas. They were more like…imprints in the place where a soul used to be. A shape pressed against the diaphanous fabric between the mortal world and the other world, echoes of the self that had been just before they crossed over. They were damn good storytellers in truth, and almost always grateful for the company. But tonight she wasn’t in the mood.

The echoes were gathering in groups, reveling and whirling between headstones, the sound of their chatter and laughter a sort of fuzz in the back of her head. Lamont stayed curled up on the wall and tried not to make eye contact with the figures swirling up out of the ground, hoping they wouldn’t realize she could see them. She usually couldn’t anyway. The voices of the dead came through to her loud and clear just about anywhere they were laid to rest, but the veil had to be pretty thin for her to actually see them. Well, the veil didn’t get much thinner than tonight, and the echoes were making the most of their easy access to the mortal realm. Luckily, they seemed mostly content with their own company, laughing and dancing silently over dry leaves, and leaving her well enough alone.

Emphasis on the “mostly.”

Out of the corner of her eye, she saw a figure sidling over to her, away from the humming crowd of the dead. Just her luck, she thought irritably.

The shape was a man, she noted, not too long dead but bearing none of the hallmarks of hard living that anyone who had spent time in this city in the past thirteen years would have had. Probably a victim of the first wave of the plague. She’d seen a lot of those. His hands were stuck in his pockets and his dark hair was slicked back.

She ignored him, hoping he would get the hint and wander back off. Instead, the echo leaned up against the wall next to her, watching the festivities thoughtfully. He spoke without turning toward her.

“You can see us.”

It wasn’t really a question. Lamont gave him a quick look.

“Yeah,” she admitted. “I can see you. But I’m not…I’m not really in the mood for talking tonight. Sorry.”

“That’s okay,” The echo crossed his arms. “You don’t have to talk if you don’t want.”

Well, that sounded just fine to her. She stayed where she was, face buried up to her nose in her arms, waiting for him to leave. He didn’t. He just stood there, staring out at the cemetery like he was waiting for something. It was making her a little nervous, honestly.

“Don’t you want to go…I don’t know, enjoy the night?” she said finally, breaking the silence. “Veil’s thin today, it’s party time, right?”

“Hah,” the echo smiled to himself. “Parties have never really been my thing, I guess.”

“Yeah, me neither.”

“Funny how you hang on to things like that even when you’re dead.”

“I wouldn’t know.”

The echo laughed at that.

“No,” he said, “no, I guess you wouldn’t.”

She propped her chin up on her knees, watching the echo out of the corner of her eye. Part of her still wanted to be left alone to nurse her wounded pride and growing resentment, wait to be dragged back to the house like a misbehaving child. But part of her, that lonely, distant planet in her that drove her out here in the first place, that part maybe didn’t quite mind the company so much.

“I’m Lamont, by the way,” the echo said, as if reading her mind.

Now that got her attention.

For the first time, she lifted her head up from her arms to look at him directly. He wasn’t much taller than she was, dark hair, dark skin, wearing an awkward, lopsided sort of smile.

“Huh,” she squinted at him. “That’s weird. My name’s Lamont too.”

The ghost laughed again. “Yeah, I know. You think I wouldn’t recognize my own niece when I see her?”

That was when she noticed the cross around his neck. She’d only ever seen the actual charm once or twice, unwrapped from its customary bandage, but she knew the cord anywhere. She gaped at him.

“So, you’re…you’re actually…”

“Lamont Toucey,” the echo grinned at her and stuck out his hand. “Nice to finally meet you.”

“But…” the gears in her brain were creaking, notches refusing to slide into place. She reached out mechanically and mimed shaking his hand, though their hands passed right through each other. “Worth said you died in his office. That they laid you to rest there. Why are you here? _How_ are you here?”

“Yeah, well, a pile of bricks and soot isn’t exactly the coziest place to spend an afterlife,” he crossed his arms. “The nice thing about being cremated is you can basically go wherever your ashes go. I can visit most places in the city, but it’s easier to get a peek through the veil in places where other people are buried. Curtain’s already parted, you know?”

She nodded, wide-eyed, unsure of what to say. How do you meet a man you’ve already known your whole life?

The echo of Lamont turned away and tipped his head back.

“Besides,” he said, smiling again. “I spent more than enough time hanging around that dump while I was alive. It’s not much worse now that it’s a pile of ash than it was in its heyday. I’m sure you’ve noticed your dad isn’t exactly a neat freak.”

He stopped and let out a goofy, barking sort of laugh.

“Hah, listen to that. ‘Your dad…’” He was grinning up into the starry night, mirroring back the smile of the moon. “I’ve called Worth a lot of things, but I can honestly say I never thought that would be one of them. Never pinned him as one to settle down.”

The living Lamont, the breathing, heart pounding, hands shaking Lamont, had been watching her namesake with wide eyes. But as he spoke her face twisted into a scowl. She swiveled away from him, kicking her legs over the street-facing side of the wall.

“Yeah. Sometimes I think he still wishes he hadn’t,” she mumbled, shoes skimming aimlessly over the ground.

The echo’s smile fell away and he turned to look at her again.

“What makes you say that?”

Lamont sighed, aimed a vicious kick at a clod of dirt. She thought of Worth’s twisted up, pissed off face. Conrad at the foot of her bed. The two of them, bright, white lights, forever blazing, circling each other so white hot she could only catch the glare.

“He never wants me to go with them. He’s always trying to dump me back in stupid Tallahassee. I think I could convince Conrad to take me on more missions if I had the chance, but Worth…”

She gritted her teeth and scraped her nails over the crumbling stone underneath her.

“He thinks things would be easier without me. I can tell.”

The echo considered her for a moment. He settled down onto the wall next to her, turning back to the cemetery, hands in his pockets.

“If I know one thing about Worth,” he said finally, “It’s that he has never done a single thing in his entire life unless he wanted to.”

The echo looked up at the moon as Lamont watched it glitter in the windows of the city skyline. She wondered where Conrad and Worth were. If they were still with Hanna and Yama, stitching up her mistakes. If they were in trouble. If they were looking for her.

“There’s not a force on Earth that can convince that stubborn bastard to do something he doesn’t want to do. Not even Conrad. And yeah,” he shrugged, “maybe he does think things would have been easier without you.”

Lamont’s stomach dropped, but the echo went on, and if he noticed the look twisting out over her face, he pretended not to.

“Honestly, it probably would have been. The world is a crazy, dangerous place for a kid, especially these days. But when Worth’s mind is made up…” He shook his head, then turned to look at her seriously. “Look, if he didn’t want you around, you wouldn’t have been around from the start. Yeah, maybe it would have been easier not to have a kid running around your ankles at the end of the world. But he wanted to anyway. There’s nothing that could have talked him into being your dad if he didn’t want to. And you can be damn sure there’s nothing that’ll talk him out of it now.”

The echo rubbed the back of his neck and he cracked a nervous smile.

“Haha, I hope that makes sense. I’m not that good at this sort of thing, I guess. Never was when I was human either, and I haven’t been human in a while. You get what I mean, right?”

She said nothing for a moment, trying to moderate the warm, sweet feeling that flushed through her.

“Sort of,” she started slowly. “He just…”

She bit her lip and wrapped her arms around her chest. “He just always acts like he doesn’t want me around. I don’t get it.”

Her skin was prickling, and she felt uncomfortably warm from her head to her toes.

Peeling Worth open, seeing this glimpse of what made him tick…it didn’t feel right. Like a betrayal somehow, like a risk. Like her own inner machinery was as much in danger of being prodded the wrong way as his. But there was relief too, a release from a tension she hadn’t known she was holding.

“Did he and Conrad ever tell you how long it took them to get together after everything fell apart?”

“ _’Four years and Worth had to die first,’_ ” she recited. It was something of a family joke, though Hanna was the only one who could tell it without going purple in the face. “Yeah, I know.”

“Haha, yeah exactly,” he grinned. “Getting Worth to tell someone how he feels is like…teaching an ass to walk on its hind legs.”

She snorted. Yeah, that sounded about right.

“And trust me, that’s putting it kindly. The more he cares, the meaner he gets. Poor Conrad didn’t know what hit him.”

She thought about that for a minute.

“Plus, he’s really stupid when he cares,” the older Lamont went on. “They told you about what happened last time they were here on Halloween, right?”

“Parts of it,” she shrugged. “I know they took down the Wild Hunt. There was a guy named Ples, I think, and a kid called Trevin, but they won’t tell me any more about them. And I know what happened with you.”

“Did they tell you that Worth volunteered for the Hunt?”

Her jaw dropped.

“No.”

“Yep. Hanna was going to do it, but Worth jumped right in before anyone could stop him. Didn’t even have a plan. Just threw himself in the ring. He would have got his ass handed to him too if I hadn’t helped his sorry ass. And if Conrad hadn’t been there.”

She made an indignant noise.

“That asshole!” she sputtered. “And he tells _me_ not to pull stupid shit?”

She was seething, but the older Lamont barked with laughter.

“Man, you remind me of him when he was your age.” He was running a hand through his hair. Lamont blinked, turned quickly to look at him.

“Really?”

“Oh yeah,” he said, “just as pissed off and self-righteous.”

“Hey!”

But he was giggling now, lost in his memories in the way echoes always seemed to be once you jogged a good one.

“If you think that’s bad, you should have seen some of the dumb moves he pulled trying to ‘protect’ Liv from her dates when we were teenagers.”

Lamont thought of her Aunt Liv, all sharp edges, bitter laughter, stoic curls of cigarette smoke. She had never seemed to Lamont like someone who needed protecting from anything by anyone. She thought of the way she and Worth spit venom at each other every time they passed through Maryland, sharing jibes and whiskey and silence on the porch while Conrad was out, after they thought Lamont had gone to bed.

“He’s always been like this, huh?” she observed.

“Believe it or not, he actually used to be worse,” the echo laughed. “There was this one time when we were kids…haha, oh man, Worth would kill me if he knew I told you, but hell, I’m already dead anyway, right? Promise not to tell him I told?”

It was still a long way from morning, but the October air felt warm and the sound of echoes laughing and singing almost reminded her of the hum of voices in the front seat of a car, comforting and consistent. She nodded, a smile tugging at the corner of her lips.

*   *   *

The sky was growing light by the time the older Lamont finally ran out of stories. Tales of late-night breakouts and drunken escapades and one particular account involving a butcher that the younger Lamont really could have gone her whole life without knowing filled their little corner of the graveyard. By the time the rim of sky on the other side of the city had gone peachy and soft, her face hurt and her eyes were watering and her throat was dry and she was laughing harder than she had in a long time.

It would be another hour at least before the sun was properly risen, but her uncle’s outline began wavering as soon as the dark edges of the sky started shooting through with navy.

“Ah,” he said, pausing in the middle of a broad sweeping gesture meant to indicate the exact size of the pig he and Worth had once set loose in their high school. “I think that’s my cue.”

She cast a look up at the lightening skyline. She still had no clue where she was relative to the little townhouse she’d set off from, and soon Conrad and Worth wouldn’t be able to track her down. At least she was safe from the Sluagh Sidhe for now. That thought wiped the smile from her face. “For now.”

She just hoped the four of them had been able to clean up the mess she’d made of that. If her stupid escapade had caused any kind of backslide in moonlighter-human relations on this side of the country, she’d have hell to pay. Literally.

“It was nice meeting you, kid,” the echo said, pushing himself up from the wall. Across the graveyard, echoes were fizzling at the edges, darting back into headstones like sea creatures under rocks. He turned to her and grinned, a cool sort of breeze passing over her head as he ruffled her hair. “Don’t be a stranger, okay? You’re ever in California again, you know where to find me.”

She nodded. Something was sinking in her stomach again as he pulled away, the dull blue glow of his outline growing fainter.

“And don’t worry about getting home,” his voice has a little garbled now, like it was coming in through a tin can. “I get the feeling you’ll have some help soon.”

“Thanks Lamont,” she said. “It was nice to meet you too.”

“You can call me Uncle Monty if you want,” he flashed a toothy grin.

“That’s stupid.” But she was grinning right back and wishing the safety of daylight could have held out just a bit longer.

“Yeah, I know,” he agreed, “Don’t tell Worth. He’ll never let me live it down.”

“Until next time then, Uncle Monty.”

And then Lamont was alone in the graveyard with her thoughts and the settling dust of spirits only she could see and the sleepy song of birds darting between the trees. Blue this time, she noted, and fully responsive to the growing light.

But the solitude didn’t last long.

She hardly had time to draw her legs back up to her chest and wonder just how the hell she was going to make her way back to Hanna’s place when the roar of an engine punched through the morning stillness.

The screech of tires over pavement at speeds that roads this small really, _really_ weren’t designed to accommodate sent Lamont leaping to her feet on the living side of the wall.

A familiar white SUV skidded around a corner, barreling down the street so fast it nearly shot right by her. Brakes squealed and it jolted to a stop in front of the crumbling sign at the far side of the wall, then, without missing a beat, glided into reverse. It skidded to a halt directly across the street from where she was now standing, arms hanging limply at her sides.

Doors slammed open and two vampires were flying over the pavement toward her. They did not look even a little bit pleased.

_“What the hell were you thinking?”_

Conrad was practically flapping his arms in a fury, looking more like a deranged bat than he did when he was actually in bat form.

“You could have been killed!” he screeched. “And how the hell did you get all the way out here? You’re practically in the suburbs! Do you have any idea how many cemeteries there are in the greater metropolitan area of this stupid city?”

He carried on, ranting and raving about death wishes and boneheaded moves and wasn’t chasing one impulsive midget around the city bad enough? But Lamont wasn’t looking at him.

Worth had shoved him aside and was glowering down at her, looming high above her, his face colder and angrier than she’d ever seen it. His eyes were glittering and furious. She realized she was holding her breath, waiting for the real shouting to start.

Then suddenly, she had a face full of matted fur.

Worth had dropped to the ground and tugged her into a gruff embrace so tight that she might have been concerned for the wellbeing of her spine if she hadn’t been so relieved. His cool forehead was pressing into the top of her head, the smell of smoke familiar and comforting.

“It got away,” she finally mumbled into his collar. “The Sluagh Sidhe.”

Conrad shook his head grimly.

“You’re just lucky _you_ got away! Are you okay? Are you hurt?”

“I’m fine, I’m okay,” she said, which was true enough. Her hands had stopped stinging hours ago and the blood on her face had long since congealed, though her head still throbbed a bit where she’d been hit. “Did you guys find them? Did you get them?”

“We did, as a matter of fact,” Conrad was hovering, fluttering anxiously just behind Worth, unsure of what to do with himself. “Whatever you did, you did a real number on it. We hardly even needed to salt it in, there couldn’t have been more than a dozen or two left. Would have been easier if you’d left us a bit more iron to work with though.”

Worth finally let go and held her out at arm’s length, Conrad’s question apparently sending him into doctor mode. She hung her head as he inspected the throbbing spot over her eyebrow.

“I lost the crowbar,” she admitted, hissing slightly as he poked the wound. “My knives too.”

“Good,” Worth grumbled. “Stupidest damned things I ever seen in my life. Goddamned flashy and impractical.”

Lamont glared at him, outraged. “You were the one who wanted me to practice! You said it would build character!”

He shrugged, turning his attention to her raw palms.

“Yeah, like gettin’ pissed off yer gourd at a college party an fallin’ offa somethin’ builds character.”

Lamont huffed and pulled her hands away.

“Well I thought they were cool.”

“And you also thought it was a good idea to take on an angry horde of ghosts by yourself on Halloween,” Conrad snapped.

“Yeah, well, runs in the family I guess,” she muttered under her breath.

Worth’s eyes snapped to her face, brows furrowed suspiciously, but Conrad didn’t seem to hear her.

“I mean, yes, I’m glad we were able to make short work of them and it was good thinking to hide out on hallowed ground, but Jesus Lamont, you could have been seriously hurt!”

“I met him tonight,” she heard herself saying. Worth was finally standing up, apparently satisfied that she would at least survive the trip back to the house and the rest of his medical supplies.

“Who, Jesus?” Worth grumbled, wiping crusted blood off his hands. “Ya try anythin’ that stupid again and I’ll make damn sure ya do.”

“No, Lamont.”

Worth blinked at her. Conrad froze.

“What?”

“You know,” she insisted. “Uncle Lamont.”

Conrad gaped at her, and a strange, unidentifiable expression passed over Worth’s face.

“A ghost?” Conrad said, looking completely nonplussed. He and Worth exchanged one of their capital-L Looks. “But I thought you…we laid him to rest, didn’t we?”

“No, no, not a ghost,” Lamont shook her head. “An echo. I could see them tonight. Thinning veil and stuff. There were more than I’ve ever seen all at once, and he was one of them. I saw him. I talked to him.”

Conrad looked at a loss. Worth was giving her this look, his head tilted like he was trying to work something out.

“Tell me,” Worth said slowly, “tell me he didn’t tell ya the butcher story.”

A smile crept up over her face. Worth groaned and slid a hand over his face.

“Wait, what’s the butcher story?”

The sun was still safely below the horizon, but she could see the faint, red pucker of a burn creeping over both their foreheads, so she didn’t protest when Worth slung an arm around her, towing her toward the car.

“Why haven’t I heard the butcher story?” Conrad insisted, looking between them. Lamont was grinning in spite of herself and Worth was scowling, but not, she noticed in a way that looked particularly angry.

“’Cause no one should hear the goddamn butcher story,” Worth growled. “And if Mont were alive I’d kill ‘im all over again for tellin’ her.”

“Oh, ha ha. Come on, if our daughter has to live with the knowledge of your misspent youth then I should too.”

Worth released her they reached the open door, letting her clamber into the back. Conrad was sliding into the front seat and Worth flopped into the passenger side after him.

“Nope. Nuh uh. Kid takes it to her grave, just like her uncle did.”

The engine sputtered to a start and they were trundling back into the city. The sky was turning a stringy peach pink and Lamont, she suddenly realized, was exhausted. She hoped there would be food back at the house. Hanna threw a hell of a Halloween party and if guests would be arriving today, chances were food would already be on the spit. Maybe there would be roast pork, she thought, or those giant mushrooms the gnomes grew up in Jefferson. She hoped there would be some fairies in attendance so she could steal a few sips of fairy wine. Maybe Caoimhe would even be there. She thought dreamily about food and the Glaistig’s dimples as Conrad glanced at her in the rear-view mirror.

“Well if you won’t tell me, she will. Right Lamont?”

Lamont blinked innocently back at his floating glasses in the mirror.

“I have no idea what you’re talking about, Dad.”

Conrad turned back to the road with a huff, and a long, fur-sleeved arm shot out and ruffled her hair.

“That’s my girl.”

She smiled and leaned her head back, fully intending to sleep the rest of the way back to the house. But she hardly had time to close her eyes when something flicked her right in the cut on her forehead. She had a pretty good guess at who had done that.

“Ow,” she started to say, when she caught sight of the Worth’s hand.

He was holding out his scalpel, handle pointed toward her, steel glinting in the weak sunlight. She just stared for a long moment.

“G’on an take it,” he said finally. “It won’t bite.”

She reached out hesitantly, the metal cold in her hand.

“Not quite s’good as iron,” he said, retracting his arm, “but it’s come in handy in a pinch more’n once.”

“You’re giving me this?” she asked, incredulous, clutching it reverently like a holy relic.

“Ya need a weapon, don’t ya?” he shrugged. “It did me well enough fer a few good years. I reckon you kin get a few more out’ve it with a lil practice.”

“Are you giving her more knives?” Conrad demanded. “Oh great, just perfect. I’ve spent the past three weeks trying to get those other ones away from her, thank you very much.”

She left them to their bickering turned the scalpel over in her hands. The one from the other life Worth had had long before her. The one that never once seemed to leave her dad’s pocket in all these years, except to slice through men and moonlighters alike with deadly precision.

She tilted the blade, watching as it caught first her own reflection, then a pair of glasses and a ratty fur collar hanging suspended in the front seat, then the growing light of sunrise out the window.


End file.
